Now, computer that cracks jokes

British scientists have developed a computer with a 'sense of humour' which generates its own witty one-liners.
The machine, created by scientists at the University of Edinburgh, was programmed to exploit one of the most successful and popular components of comedy, where a statement is followed up with a surprising comment.
However, some of the jokes the computer produces can be rather sexist, 'The Telegraph' reported.
The computer software was designed to find unlikely pairings of words and to make a connection between them.
David Matthews, a computer scientist who helped develop the computerised comedian at the University of Edinburgh's school of informatics, said when they tested the jokes on volunteers they found they laughed, although not as much as man made humour.

He said for computer generated jokes to improve, the software would need to develop cultural awareness.
"Computers have an advantage over people in that they can process masses of information, so we fed computers a wealth of material from which they extracted creative and unusual word combinations to fit our joke template," Matthews was quoted as saying by the paper.
"The holy grail for machine-generated comedy would be to include cultural references, but these are very hard to capture," he said.